Philosophy time!
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Although you have to admit that his thoughts still have a big impact on todays society. They may be a bit backward to some people but his theories are formed from the events that were around him at the time. Athenian Democracy did kill Socrates.Seanchaidh said:
Yes. Yes it is awful.Smudge91 said:
Every thesis which Plato came up with was eventually disproved by his pupil Aristotle. Even if you don't buy Aristotle's arguments, consider this: The goal of The Republic is to set up a culture ruled by a supposedly benevolent dictator, whose rule itself is based on a lie. It encourages dogmatism and unfree thought. Subscription to Platonic metaphysics involves belief that the world is bad, sensation is bad, and that you will be reincarnated as a slug if you enjoy anything apart from spending the day with your head in the clouds thinking. Which you can only do if you are one of the select few. Otherwise, you are destined for an eternity of slug-dom.
Glad I got that off my chest.
That's fair. It comes down to this, is there any way to find out if reality is a dream? If yes, I very much do care. If no (as you are saying), then I agree with your "who cares" sentiment.Jedamethis said:
I'm not convinced there is no way to get down to the very bottom of what reality is hence my reaction.
Because of "I think therefore I am" if reality is a dream then only one of us is actually conscious and everyone else is just a dream character. There is no way to prove anyone else is conscious (for now). You may all be zombies for all I know. That you are not zombies is a reasonable assumption.
First we have to be able to scientifically explain consciousness. If we prove others are conscious then reality is not a dream. It may, however, still then be a simulation.
Actually this brings back that "How do you know you feel pain" question. You may say that you feel pain but maybe your just a zombie who is (for the lack of a better word) programmed to say that. I know that I feel pain because of "I think therefore I am" but I can't know about anyone else.
First we have to be able to scientifically explain consciousness. If we prove others are conscious then reality is not a dream. It may, however, still then be a simulation.
Actually this brings back that "How do you know you feel pain" question. You may say that you feel pain but maybe your just a zombie who is (for the lack of a better word) programmed to say that. I know that I feel pain because of "I think therefore I am" but I can't know about anyone else.
Actually philosophy doesn't really discuss the matter "is our life a dream", more like "what is real". I like to go with Jean Paul Sartre in this case.
Than* 10 iq "points"? You failed at your own damn thread.Fniff said:
xD Outsmarting the teacher, priceless.Souplex said:
OT: Well, if the "portal gun" were real. And you shot the first portal onto the ground. Fired the second one next to it. Took a thin sheet of a solid, large enough to fit a portal on, and slid it halfway through either portal. Then shot either of the portals onto the sheet. What would happen? o.e
Any theories? I could never come up with one, mainly cause i just can't be bothered :3 But i'm interested if anyone suggests anything.
Hello, fellow escapists.
In this reply i will preach to you my views on life, death, god and how it all works.
Alrighty then, as i was pondering my mind for answers to all these big questions it hit me, that i have put thought to these questions many times before.
I have come to think about life and death in a way that tells me that all inteligent life needs to believe in a higher being, to bring them a feeling of meaning and that a path has been laid for them to follow through life.
I think that everyone raised to believe in a higher being will feel comforted when just talking their problems over with whatever divine creature they believe in, because even though you deny it with all you've got, there will always be a part of you desperately clingin to the belief of something bigger.
Because without anything bigger then ourselves, there is no guidance, there is no security.
And here lies the biggest flaw in the human mind, the need to be secure in the hands of an older, wiser power than yourself, this is almost the concept of childhood, needing your guides (parents) constantly to help you with your troubles.
But when they're not there, you will be so overcome with fear of being alone, that you wont even realize that its okay, your parents will find you any minute now.
Its like when you hear tales, of people that think god has forsaken them, and they will go insane in the long run because they cannot handle it all on their own.
when you then die, you have eternity to spend asking all your questions, and getting them out of the way with your own special divine being.
and not before, you accept and believe the answers you are given, will you be granted a new life on earth.
or maybe another planet, or another.
but the thing is that no one has yet fully accepted their answers and passed the test, because we are only human, and we cannot withstand the truth, our minds are simply not strong enough to handle it.
now every smart person in the chat that has ever done a real iq test will think to them "i will be the first person to pass through, all my friends seem to be buggered by none of these great questions that i think about before i go to sleep, therefore i must be smarter then the most" and thats completely normal, because all humans are selfish to a certain degree.
But the inteligent people here in the world are the rest - the people that you are not smarter then, but equals, brothers of knowledge, the people that you share your thoughts with and extract a one sided meaning, and the people that are not so bright are the people that should be tought by the smart.
im probably gonna edit this sometime, because i feel that something is missing.
but thats all for now so, if you liked my preach (or not) send me a private message, with a smiley (or an argument)
-Damn my fingers are cold now!
In this reply i will preach to you my views on life, death, god and how it all works.
Alrighty then, as i was pondering my mind for answers to all these big questions it hit me, that i have put thought to these questions many times before.
I have come to think about life and death in a way that tells me that all inteligent life needs to believe in a higher being, to bring them a feeling of meaning and that a path has been laid for them to follow through life.
I think that everyone raised to believe in a higher being will feel comforted when just talking their problems over with whatever divine creature they believe in, because even though you deny it with all you've got, there will always be a part of you desperately clingin to the belief of something bigger.
Because without anything bigger then ourselves, there is no guidance, there is no security.
And here lies the biggest flaw in the human mind, the need to be secure in the hands of an older, wiser power than yourself, this is almost the concept of childhood, needing your guides (parents) constantly to help you with your troubles.
But when they're not there, you will be so overcome with fear of being alone, that you wont even realize that its okay, your parents will find you any minute now.
Its like when you hear tales, of people that think god has forsaken them, and they will go insane in the long run because they cannot handle it all on their own.
when you then die, you have eternity to spend asking all your questions, and getting them out of the way with your own special divine being.
and not before, you accept and believe the answers you are given, will you be granted a new life on earth.
or maybe another planet, or another.
but the thing is that no one has yet fully accepted their answers and passed the test, because we are only human, and we cannot withstand the truth, our minds are simply not strong enough to handle it.
now every smart person in the chat that has ever done a real iq test will think to them "i will be the first person to pass through, all my friends seem to be buggered by none of these great questions that i think about before i go to sleep, therefore i must be smarter then the most" and thats completely normal, because all humans are selfish to a certain degree.
But the inteligent people here in the world are the rest - the people that you are not smarter then, but equals, brothers of knowledge, the people that you share your thoughts with and extract a one sided meaning, and the people that are not so bright are the people that should be tought by the smart.
im probably gonna edit this sometime, because i feel that something is missing.
but thats all for now so, if you liked my preach (or not) send me a private message, with a smiley (or an argument)
-Damn my fingers are cold now!
Ah, yes. As I pointed out earlier what he is asking is a scientific question not a philosophical one. If you change the question as you suggest it becomes philosophical because it is about what we think of as "real"Spitfire175 said:
Our instruments can tell what is happening to a persons brain but how can they tell us what is happening to his consciousness? If someone else is a zombie (not consious) then "hurting" him is like damaging a machine an watching it break. The same results would be had either way.Walden said:
If our equipments read that he is "feeling" pain it could just be that his brain in reacting that way. It does not prove there is actual pain.
Oh no, I did mean that in a bad way. I'm not sure why I felt the need to point out that I had already said that.Spitfire175 said:
My apologies, I only meant to agree with you.
essentially how do you define the reality of reality? the only perceptions we have of the world around us are our own, there is no way for us to perceive the world as another does. this begs the question of whether another person's reality is the same as ours, essentially are they perceiving the same things that we are? does everyone view colours in the same way? when we use language are we all hearing the same things? do we all use the same words to describe the same things? if you take this question deep enough then you can question any sense of reality itself. nothing is provable because we aren't objective. we can't step outside of our own perceptions and view the universe on its own terms, therefore any question ever asked can never be adequately answered. sice reality itself could be an entirely subjective perception, questions like 'am i real or is this a dream?' are completely irrelevant. you are what you are, but you'll never ever have an adequate answer to the question of what exactly that is.
or you could just forget about all that crap and find something to do. either way.
or you could just forget about all that crap and find something to do. either way.
On the issue of whether or not life is a dream, there are two ways to interpret the question.
The first thing that particularly stands out in my mind is that we have no base-line perception of what counts as dream and what counts as reality. We percieve, or are capable of percieving, equally well in both states and rationalize, or are capable of rationalizing, equally well in both states. We exist equally in both states and declaring that one is reality while the other is fantasy is philosphically unsound.
It is possible that what we percieve most of the time is a pseudo-dream state, yes, but that doesn't have to imply that there is something to wake up to which will be "real". For all we know there are strata of perception that human beings are capable of traveling through, each one distinctly seperate from the next and none of them the "true state of being". We can't arbitrarily pick one to call reality and disregard the rest, that would be dishonest. We live in a certain state of perception and we accept that other states exist but saying that we are really alive elewhere is untrue. This is the state we percieve in and, if we were perceiving in the so called "real" state, it would be just as dream-like or non-dream-like, from the perception of other states.
The second thing that stands out is perhaps more in line with the nature of your inquiry. Saying that this world is "merely a dream" implies that we exist elsewhere. It suggests that we would have a second cognative apparatus connected to our "dreaming body" which would be our (for the purposes of this specific argument) "true sleeping mind". This of course begs the question what the purpose of our "dreaming mind" is.
There are two approaches to take, the first being that our "dreaming mind" retains some autonomy from our "true sleeping mind" the same way we are not fully in control of our actions in our own dreams but we are fully aware of them. If this were the case it would suggest our personal independance and ability to assert ourselves within a dream world without the guidance of a "true sleeping you". Under those circumstances I would argue that we exist as subsets and facets of a "true sleeping mind" who would be likely to retain their independance even if the "true sleeping mind" awoke; the same way the Id, Ego and Super-Ego retain moderate independance in our own head even as we are conciously awake. This would suggest that a good portion of the people you interact with would be "real" from the percpective that they weren't imagined by you but rather by independant sentient drives and desires within a larger mind that both of you contribute to.
The other option to consider is that the "dreaming mind" is controlled directly by, and is a duplication of, the "true sleeping mind". If this were the case, you would be conciously aware of yourself the way we are conciously aware of ourselves in dreams. The name you have in this "dream" would be the same name you had in "real life" because you would otherwise (because your mind is preserved and a duplicate of your "true sleeping mind") be constantly reminded that people were calling you by the wrong name. Along a similar vein of thought, the moral values that you hold in this life will be the same as the ones you hold in the "real world" and your fears and hopes here will be the same fears and hopes you would have there. This all suggests that any "real world" we might wake up to would be at least functionally similar to the one we are dreaming in as all values, fears and hopes are easily transferable between the two states. In other words, the "real world" probably wouldn't be that amazingly different from the dream-world.
My two cents on the issue...
Oh, and while I'm writing a treatise I might as well mention that I put very little stock in the theroy that our world is a computer simulation. The concept is that somewhere, somehow, a civilization developed a simulator that correctly portrayed life. The life in this simulator then developed a simulator that could accurately portray life. And than the life in the simulated life's simulator found a way to create a simulator that could accurately portray life. Down the list it goes and before long it becomes very unlikely that our galaxy was the first to roll around. Odds are we are simulated life.
That all makes sense and I could agree with it except for one thing. The original supercomputer that holds all the universes and the universes created by other universes would need to be constantly expanding it's RAM and processing power exponentially just to stay functional. Simulating an entire universe may be possible but simulating an infinite series of universes which are constantly producing more univereses would require a grotesque amount of power, memory and processing which the original supercomputer would have to run short of eventually. There is a maximum limit to the number of universes that could be physically simulated and, as such, the infinite string of universes theory is less than persuasive from my perspective.
The first thing that particularly stands out in my mind is that we have no base-line perception of what counts as dream and what counts as reality. We percieve, or are capable of percieving, equally well in both states and rationalize, or are capable of rationalizing, equally well in both states. We exist equally in both states and declaring that one is reality while the other is fantasy is philosphically unsound.
It is possible that what we percieve most of the time is a pseudo-dream state, yes, but that doesn't have to imply that there is something to wake up to which will be "real". For all we know there are strata of perception that human beings are capable of traveling through, each one distinctly seperate from the next and none of them the "true state of being". We can't arbitrarily pick one to call reality and disregard the rest, that would be dishonest. We live in a certain state of perception and we accept that other states exist but saying that we are really alive elewhere is untrue. This is the state we percieve in and, if we were perceiving in the so called "real" state, it would be just as dream-like or non-dream-like, from the perception of other states.
The second thing that stands out is perhaps more in line with the nature of your inquiry. Saying that this world is "merely a dream" implies that we exist elsewhere. It suggests that we would have a second cognative apparatus connected to our "dreaming body" which would be our (for the purposes of this specific argument) "true sleeping mind". This of course begs the question what the purpose of our "dreaming mind" is.
There are two approaches to take, the first being that our "dreaming mind" retains some autonomy from our "true sleeping mind" the same way we are not fully in control of our actions in our own dreams but we are fully aware of them. If this were the case it would suggest our personal independance and ability to assert ourselves within a dream world without the guidance of a "true sleeping you". Under those circumstances I would argue that we exist as subsets and facets of a "true sleeping mind" who would be likely to retain their independance even if the "true sleeping mind" awoke; the same way the Id, Ego and Super-Ego retain moderate independance in our own head even as we are conciously awake. This would suggest that a good portion of the people you interact with would be "real" from the percpective that they weren't imagined by you but rather by independant sentient drives and desires within a larger mind that both of you contribute to.
The other option to consider is that the "dreaming mind" is controlled directly by, and is a duplication of, the "true sleeping mind". If this were the case, you would be conciously aware of yourself the way we are conciously aware of ourselves in dreams. The name you have in this "dream" would be the same name you had in "real life" because you would otherwise (because your mind is preserved and a duplicate of your "true sleeping mind") be constantly reminded that people were calling you by the wrong name. Along a similar vein of thought, the moral values that you hold in this life will be the same as the ones you hold in the "real world" and your fears and hopes here will be the same fears and hopes you would have there. This all suggests that any "real world" we might wake up to would be at least functionally similar to the one we are dreaming in as all values, fears and hopes are easily transferable between the two states. In other words, the "real world" probably wouldn't be that amazingly different from the dream-world.
My two cents on the issue...
Oh, and while I'm writing a treatise I might as well mention that I put very little stock in the theroy that our world is a computer simulation. The concept is that somewhere, somehow, a civilization developed a simulator that correctly portrayed life. The life in this simulator then developed a simulator that could accurately portray life. And than the life in the simulated life's simulator found a way to create a simulator that could accurately portray life. Down the list it goes and before long it becomes very unlikely that our galaxy was the first to roll around. Odds are we are simulated life.
That all makes sense and I could agree with it except for one thing. The original supercomputer that holds all the universes and the universes created by other universes would need to be constantly expanding it's RAM and processing power exponentially just to stay functional. Simulating an entire universe may be possible but simulating an infinite series of universes which are constantly producing more univereses would require a grotesque amount of power, memory and processing which the original supercomputer would have to run short of eventually. There is a maximum limit to the number of universes that could be physically simulated and, as such, the infinite string of universes theory is less than persuasive from my perspective.